Consumers have been looking for ways to get the entire history of a favorite musician, author, artist, event or family for as long as there have been methods to collect that information. Unfortunately, there have not been any simple or straightforward methods or platforms available to label, archive, sort, search and present all of that information in one format. In addition, when new information—whether contemporary or historic—is introduced on a particular subject, it is practically impossible to archive that information intelligently into the collection without reorganizing the collection manually.
For example, dedicated fans of an musician may spend the better part of several decades, along with a great deal of money, collecting everything by or about that musician, including recordings, articles, ticket stubs, programs, posters, books, letters, interviews, notes and anything else that artist may have produced. Although these consumers may still be willing to spend the same amount of money to acquire all of these items, it is clear that many consumers would like to consolidate all of these items into a compact and easily reviewable space. An example of this point may be a collection of vinyl recordings. While these recordings may be the preferred recording for many music lovers—these vinyl recordings are susceptible to damage or destruction by heat, children, pets or poor audio equipment.
One of the methods of presenting information on a television channel, such as the History Channel, is to present a documentary on a particular topic—say, the War of 1812—and then present additional information on the Internet at HistoryChannel.com, such as letters from soldiers, timelines, electronic texts of history books and scholarly articles on the War of 1812. While this process is certainly one way of providing different types of information on a topic—it still does not solve the problem of providing intelligently sorted new information to an interested consumer.
In another example, a family either compiles or pays for another entity to compile a history of the family whether it's in family tree form or another form. Regardless of the method of compilation, the “compilee” is missing information—whether it's information from the family or information found outside of the family's knowledge. Therefore, it is easy to comprehend that a family history may be initially prepared and include certain information, but a true family history is prepared by including letters from family members, stories that are told on video and in writing, photos, videos and documents. In addition, when a new family member or members are discovered or born, it is not easy to incorporate that additional information into an already existing family history without significantly reorganizing the entire collection of information. Also, as technology advances, it may be difficult to migrate that information to new formats without losing information.
These examples, along with countless others, show that there is still a need for a method and platform for intelligently organizing and archiving the information at hand, while at the same time allowing the flexibility of incorporating new information as it comes available. In addition, consumers with these “ultimate collections” should have the ability to be notified as this information becomes available, so that they may decide whether to add it to the collection where it will be intelligently sorted and archived in relation to everything else in the collection.